Hate Profiteering: The SPLC Hate Hustlers

“The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people.” —Thomas Jefferson (1801)

In the 5th century BC treatise, “The Art of War” (attributed to Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu), it is written, “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be put at risk even in a hundred battles.” In modern shorthand, that has been reduced to simply “Know your enemy,” though knowing your own capabilities remains equally important.

To better know our adversaries, our editors and analysts subscribe to a broad spectrum of political publications — leftmost among them being the daily Communist Party USA propaganda sheet, which provides marching orders to all the leftist hate opposition to American Liberty and Rule of Law. A notch less leftward than the CPUSA would be the Democrat Party daily updates and appeals.

However, after Charlottesville, the frequency of appeals from Demo chairman Tom Perez has increased to three per day, and even Hillary is back in the act.

Why the sudden deluge? Because, of course, fomenting disunity and hate along racial, ethnic, religious, economic and gender lines is the bread and butter of the Democrat Party platform, but racial division has long been the keystone of that corrupt platform.

Race riots erupted in Oakland, Akron and Pittsburgh in 2009; Santa Cruz, Oakland and Los Angeles in 2010; Oakland in 2011; Chicago and Anaheim in 2012; Brooklyn in 2013; Ferguson and New York City in 2014; Baltimore in 2015; and Anaheim, Chicago, St. Paul, Milwaukee, Charlotte, Standing Rock, Oakland and Portland in 2016. In 2017 a new breed of anarcho-fascists emerged under the old communist “antifa” banner, in DC, Berkeley, Anaheim, Berkeley Part 2, Berkeley Part 3, Olympia, Portland and again in Berkeley last weekend.

The Democrats’ race-bait rhetoric also resulted in their appalling war on cops, leading to the assassination of police officers in New York, Dallas and Baton Rouge, and the murder and injury of officers elsewhere across the nation.

However, since Obama’s departure, there has been, by comparison, a dry spell for racial disunity — until Charlottesville. In that otherwise idyllic town, Democrats and their national Leftmedia propaganda machine successfully turned an ACLU-defended, permit-sanctioned protest by a handful of sociopathic white supremacists into a violent conflagration — opening the Demo-goguery fundraising floodgates.

In lockstep, they followed the maxim of Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel (now mayor of Obama’s hometown — that bloody Demo cesspool known as Chicago): “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Indeed, the Democrats and their media outlets have successfully launched their version of the Stalinist/Maoist Cultural Revolution across America, using historic monuments and statues as donor-dollar flash points.

Rounding out the trifecta of hate beneficiaries are the race-bait hate hustlers, profiteers who emerge from their rat holes to line their own pockets whenever Demo/Leftmedia collusion creates donor-dollar opportunities.

These race-baiters fall into two categories:

First are the extortionists — folks like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who gently encourage (read: extort) corporate payoffs to avoid boycotts.

Second are the hate-hustlers, who offer corporations the appearance of being crusaders against hate in return for large donations. Leading that pack is a racket called the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) founded by a lawyer and accomplished marketer, Morris Dees. On the political spectrum, SPLC falls in the narrowing gap between the CPUSA and the Democrat Party.

SPLC’s political agenda is nothing more than an extension of Dees’ leftist views, and it’s a cash cow. At the time he was cranking up SPLC, Dees served as national finance director for leftist George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign. He was then Jimmy Carter’s national finance director in 1976. In 1980, he was national finance chairman for uber-leftist Ted Kennedy’s 1980 Democrat primary challenge to the incumbent Carter.

Dees knows how to spin a yarn in order to collect money, and despite his social justice crusader cape, his former law partner, Millard Fuller said of their years in business: “Morris and I shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money. We were not particular about how we did it; we just wanted to be independently rich.” One example of how “not particular” they were, included defending racists, whose legal fees were paid by the KKK.

According to its most recent Form 990 and annual report, SPLC now has an “endowment” of $320 million. In the most recent year of record, 2015, the organization listed revenue in excess of $58 million. Its top management raked in more than $1.9 million in salaries and $325,000 in other compensation. Notably, they also have $millions in offshore “financial interests” in the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda. Regarding those accounts Amy Sterling Casil, CEO of a firm which advises non-profit organizations, observed, “I’ve never known a US-based nonprofit dealing in human rights or social services to have any foreign bank accounts. It is a huge red flag. [It’s] unethical. … I know of no legitimate reason for [SPLC] to put money in overseas, unregulated bank accounts.”

While the SPLC is in the South, it most certainly is not impoverished. Dees and his cadre reside in their $25-million six-story headquarters in Montgomery, known locally as the “Poverty Palace.”

When it comes to fundraising prowess, Jackson and Sharpton are rank amateurs compared to Dees.

As the self-proclaimed arbiters of what constitutes “hate,” SPLC raises its graft in two ways.

First, it spends big bucks on annoying canvassers, telemarketers, bulk mailers and direct solicitors who hound individual donors with warning scripts that there are haters lurking around every corner. Their largest line item expense is fundraising. Predictably, ill-informed celebrities like George Clooney bite — he just donated $1 million in order to feel better about himself.

SLPC also colludes with foreign interests and receives funding from donors in South America, Africa and Europe, as well as Russia and its former republics. Of course, among its foreign donors, according to a noted watchdog group that tracks leftist donations, are George Soros and his Marxist subsidiaries.

Second, SPLC raises big bucks from U.S. corporations, which seek to put the phony SPLC good hate-keeping seal of approval on their brand. Never letting a manufactured crisis go to waste, after Charlottesville, they quickly set about to cash in, promoting a “Take Down the Monuments” initiative, and its newest “hate map” targeting 1,503 historic place names. Of course, Dees has some experience deconstructing monuments. He was the plaintiff in the lawsuit to remove the Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Supreme Court building rotunda. (George Will has an amusing video on place names.)

The result was $millions in donations from Apple, JP Morgan and MGM Resorts.

To bolster its individual and corporate solicitation, Dees mastered the tactic of filing suits against high-profile low-life hate groups for awards and judgments, which he can then promote to produce a lot of donor fruit.

Over the last decade, Harper’s magazine’s Ken Silverstein has chronicled the SPLC’s hate-hustling endeavors with in-depth critical analysis of its founder, Morris Dees, a lawyer and consummate political fundraiser, and his tactics. Silverstein notes an early example of how SPLC uses its legal settlements: “In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was lynched by two Klansmen. The UKA’s total assets amounted to a warehouse whose sale netted Mrs. Donald $51,875. According to a groundbreaking [investigative news series], the SPLC, meanwhile, made $9 million from fund-raising solicitations featuring the case, including one containing a photo of Michael Donald’s corpse.

While the lawsuit tactic has proven successful, the most lucrative rate of return for SPLC is riding the race-bait waves created by Democrats and their MSM provocateurs — those rare hate group eruptions that provide donor windfall opportunities, especially from corporations and celebrities like the aforementioned, who seek to bolster their "social justice” facade by supporting SPLC.

The truth, however, is that Dees’ SPLC mission has devolved from one that, decades ago, focused on a few genuine hate groups as fodder for fundraising, to one that has now adopted the modus operandi of the Left — categorically labeling individuals and civic groups disagreeing with Dees’ hard-left political agenda as “haters.”

Even Alexander Cockburn with the leftist mag “The Nation” identifies Dees as “the archsalesman of hatemongering” preying on “mostly phony targets.” He posits, “With haters on the wane, what will the hate-seekers do?”

Well, change the definition of “hate” and make the list of targets much larger!

To better understand the current agenda of Dees and his highly profitable “non-profit,” consider that a reference to “antifa” in SPLC’s primary newsletter, “Hatewatch,” only appeared in a title once — and then merely in the context of the confab’s confrontation with white supremacists … as if the antifa mob of socialists, communists and anarchists are just peace-loving youngsters. In fact, the “antifa” banner is a collective of mostly disgruntled and disaffected middle class white adolescents (of all ages) from homes with ineffective parenting, who are angry at the world.

On the other hand, when searching for references to “Family Research Council,” a well-respected pro-family organization run by our friend Tony Perkins, it appears in 229 Hatewatch and other reports condemning the organization and Perkins as extremist.

Sidebar: Recall that a few years ago when a homosexual activist entered the Family Research Council’s Washington, DC, headquarters and shot an employee, the assailant told the FBI how he identified his target: “Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups. I found them online.” And the Democrat activist who attempted a mass assassination of Republican congressmen in June also professed to be a proud SPLC supporter.

Dees and company have set about to maliciously label other faith-based organizations and defenders, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and James Kennedy Ministries, as hate groups. Dr. Frank Wright, president of James Kennedy Ministries, said, “These false and illegal characterizations have a chilling effect on the free exercise of religion and on religious free speech for all people of faith.” I’m pleased to report that the group is now suing the SPLC — turnabout is fair play. A broad range of conservative groups have condemned the Leftmedia promotion of the SPLC “hate maps.”

The Dees hate model has become the standard for other haters of faith, like the so-called “Military Religious Freedom Foundation,” which has endeavored to have “So Help Me God” removed from military oaths.

He recently labeled Ayaan Hirsi Ali a hater because she has condemned Islamic hate. Ali notes, “I am a black woman, a feminist and a former Muslim who has consistently opposed political violence, yet the SPLC has the audacity to label me an ‘extremist.’” And, SPLC manufactured an anti-Muslim hate-crime epidemic and is running smear campaigns against the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies.

He even labels people like soft-spoken HUD Secretary Ben Carson as “extremist,” just more fundraising silage.

For the record, some 35 years ago, when providing consultation for federal, state and local law enforcement teams investigating hate groups in the Southeast — primarily neo-Nazi/KKK cells and their fringe anarchist ilk — I was a consumer of SPLC Hatewatch reports. At that time, these reports were actually of some value, but today, Hatewatch and the SPLC’s hate map is little more than aggregated information, most of which can be pasted together from basic web searches and news reports — all of which is, first and foremost, about fear-mongering for fundraising.

Now, according to Ken Blackwell, at the same time Dees supports cop-haters in the Black Lives Matter movement, “The SPLC conducts training for law enforcement groups in various parts of the United Sates. [Its] ‘law enforcement resources’ claim the most credible threats to law enforcement are those arising from right-wing actors. While the SPLC is advocating violence against police by supporting BLM and its associates, it is simultaneously instructing police on how to identify ‘hate groups.’”

Today, among the extremist groups profiled by the SPLC, you won’t find any reference to “black supremacists” or “hate” labels for the plethora of violent anarcho-socialist networks that pose a far greater threat to continuity of government and commerce than fringe white supremacist elements.

According to Tucker Carlson, SPLC is “a completely ersatz, phony leftwing lobbying group posing as a human rights organization. … Their donors don’t understand just how deeply corrupt and loathsome these people are. … They hide behind this shield of righteousness but in fact are utterly corrupt.”

Historian Victor Davis Hanson notes that some corporations “have come to the conclusion that a few activist organizations like the SPLC represent a greater danger by defamation to them of blackmail or boycotts. … More importantly the SPLC looks at minority people [as if] they have to have uniform views. … Hirsi Ali represents an existential threat to the SPLC. … They’re riding high because of the Charlottesville incident and they’re getting a lot of donations … but they may create a backlash with the corporations that support them.”

Silverstein concludes, “The SPLC, do-gooder group does very little good considering the vast sums of money it raises. … [SPLC] is essentially a fraud [that] has a habit of casually labeling organizations as ‘hate groups.’ (Which doesn’t mean that some of the groups it criticizes aren’t reprehensible.) In doing so, the SPLC shuts down debate, stifles free speech, and most of all, raises a pile of money, very little of which is used on behalf of poor people. … Morris Dees is head of … the bogus ‘civil rights organization,’ whose chief (and wildly successful) mission has been to separate wealthy liberals from their money.”

Martin Luther King said famously, “I have a dream … where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.”

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